"Wielding the Dagger": The MarineKorps Flandern and the German War Effort, 1914-1918 (review)

Mark Karau's excellent monograph on the Naval Corps in Flanders provides an account of the German Navy's activities in that area in the First World War. The strategically significant Belgian port, Antwerp, fell to the Germans in August 1914, but ship traffic could only access the North Sea by transiting the Scheldt Estuary through neutral Holland, whose violation the Germans believed would lead to English intervention, thus Antwerp remained useless. The Germans also captured intact the ports of Ostend, Zeebrugge, and Brugges, forming a triangle on the Belgian coast. While these ports were far smaller and much less useful, the Germans held on to them at a substantial cost. Naval Minister Alfred von Tirpitz believed he could mount his strategy of "little war" operations from there against the English. And, since German war aims always encompassed annexing the Belgian coast, occupation reinforced that claim.

The Flanders coast operations nonetheless constituted a third priority theater of operations and most likely constituted a drain overall to the Navy. Karau's research illustrates that the low status stemmed from a number of factors, which frustrated both the admiral in charge, Ludwig von Schröder, and his patron, Tirpitz. An aggressive commander, Schröder built up his area of operations from a division to a two-division corps with coastal artillery, and air and naval assets. Karau walks us through Schröder's battle with the Naval Staff to acquire these resources and to ensure that his command did not become subordinated to the Army, which of course carried the burden on the Western Front. The Naval Staff never wavered from its view that the primary theater of operations for Germany lay in the German Bight, followed by the Baltic Sea. The North Sea and Baltic station commanders accordingly resented, opposed, and hindered the transfer of their assets to Belgium. Second, even had the Naval Staff changed its mind, the geography of Flanders severely limited meaningful German operations. While the three ports were interlocked via a canal system, all were small facilities without room for much expansion. Capital ships were too large to enter. Port constraints limited the number of surface craft. Even the submarines that formed the Flanders flotilla were small coastal models with limited range and ordnance. All but one were actually shipped in pieces from Germany and assembled in Antwerp and moved to Brugges via canals. Worse, proximity to the front and coast left the docking facilities at Ostend and Zeebrugge highly susceptible to air and naval bombardment and perilously close to long-range artillery. Finally, the ports lay so close to England the Royal Navy could easily intercept any major reinforcement effort.

Making excellent use of primary sources, Karau describes the vicissitudes of Admiral Schröder's command through the war. Naval Station Flanders reached its zenith of importance in the winter of 1916-17 with an aggressive destroyer campaign and especially when Germany returned to unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. The Flanders operation seems to have contributed from a quarter to a third of British merchant marine losses, but when the English resorted to the convoy system in May 1917, the submarine campaign collapsed quickly. Moreover, the Naval Staff became convinced in 1917 that the English planned to invade the Scheldt Estuary and turn the flank of the entire Western Front, so Schröder spent a great deal of time developing a plan, Fall K, to counteract an English invasion that never came. Ironically, the British never seriously contemplated action against Holland. Losses to the British also forced Schröder to go on the defensive for the second half of the year, and he suffered a further drain on his few destroyers when the Naval Staff sent them to the Baltic for Operation Albion. British use of aircraft in 1918 for submarine patrols increased German losses, and...